Same Person Yet Different Stories
by AshleyXare
Summary: A girl has felt lost and the famiy has to deal with the aftermath of the tragedy with their own ways. Just a short glimpse in to my story, please tell me if it is a good concept or not.


Same Person Yet Different

11

Through the slight door crack one could see the royal purple walls and the white wooden border that divided the wall in half. With one intake one could smell the stuffy air of the bedroom. A wandering house guest would be able make out the pink polka dotted bedspread and random trinkets scattered about the floor. All of which were symbolic to the house owners of recent events that had past. These unforgettable moments had once been linked to a reason for dimples to show in the corner of their mouths. A whole month had slowly passed since the oak door was completely left open to reveal the room. The owners' emotions, slightly guarded by a manmade blockade pushed back a flood of their pains and woes, would be fully exposed to the precious memories built up in the room if they let themselves slip. The lack of desire for the two lost adults to become actively part of the room caused dust to collect like fluffy cotton balls in the room. In addition, the maid was strictly ordered by her clients to allow the dust to collect on the furniture. Even more particular, usual cleaning duties in the room were cut in addition. The evidence to this bizarreness was apparent by the unmade bed and the piles of clothes lying on the ground. Strangely enough, the only thing that the maid was allowed to intervene with in the room was the single light on the bedside table. The task of changing the light bulbs was strictly one of the jobs in the room that Mrs. Emerson, the maid, had been ordered to take care of each day. Each time she changed the bulb the urge to inquire why this was her single duty grew, but she quickly found herself distracted before she found the courage to ask. She simply followed the tasks her employers, Mr. Cole and Mrs. Cole, asked her to complete. The house owners didn't have time or the capacity to deal with curiosity and found Mrs. Emerson to be the perfect fit unlike the previous maids who questioned too much.

Mrs. Emerson's curiosity was fight away by the dreadful need for the job to support her family. Her employers had found her advertisement in the Smithton Paper. Shortly afterward, they called her and arranged a meeting in which she promised to provide the best service they ever have were to have. After deciding that the small quantity of work would allow her to get home quicker to her little ones, she quickly took the position before it would be snatched away. Not only did this mean she would get home quicker, but she would also be able to spend a suitable amount of time with her own young kids. Ultimately, the little amount of work she had to do was balanced out by the ridiculous pay rate the Coles offered. Her job started at the crack of noon each day and it started by cleaning the man's office before he would wake up. Afterwards she would then finish of the rest of her to do list. By the time she reached the last chore on her list it would be afternoon and she would leave the empty house to its occupants.

While Mr. Cole stayed at home, Mrs. Cole came home later in the evening. She worked a demanding job at the small hospital that was within a fifteen-minute commute. They often needed her to be there until late in the evening. However, she recently had been picking up a lot of extra hours. Her shifts at the hospital only seemed to stretch out longer and longer. Recently she found herself telling Mrs. Emerson white lies that it had been rough lately at the hospital with new superfluous patients. Mrs. Emerson had only seen the wife once so far throughout her employment and that was during the hiring process, she didn't particularly care too much either. Occasionally she would exchange some words with Mr. Cole, but being an assiduous writer caused him to always be preoccupied at the computer. When he was out of his office, he was to be found either getting groceries or accomplishing other errands. Mrs. Emerson noticed that these events happened frequently when he had some sort of block. Each morning when Mrs. Emerson would arrive for duty, the same mellow Mr. Cole would make a notion saying _I see you, now go to work and leave me be_. Other than the grownups, she occasionally saw their oldest daughter coming up the winding driveway in her ramshackle ford escape as she would be coming out the door. Each time they crossed paths, at least so far, Mrs. Emerson had gotten a subtle greeting from the girl. The petite girl would usually just make eye contact and smile or even say hi. After every similar occurrence like this Mrs. Emerson always stumbled upon the same thought, _where's her sister? _ Scattered about the house were pictures that showed not one girl, but two very similar girls. There was an older girl, and then a younger girl. They looked like they were a couple years apart from each other but like two peas in a pod. Mrs. Emerson thought maybe it was a friend or relative because she had not once seen the other girl. However the closer she looked at the two smiling girls, more of the sisterly bond was exposed to the human eye. The maid, so puzzled, always moved on to the conclusion that the other girl just always had a hectic schedule that caused her to never be there when she was there do the laconic cleaning. After all that's how teenagers seemed to be to her now a days, always off to no good.

It was in the middle of the night and Mr. Cole stirred from his sleep. He tossed and turned trying to fall back asleep. Never had his bed felt uncomfortable than this. Tonight it felt like a rigid rock rather than soft and fluffy. He glanced at the digital clock by his bedside and saw how late it was. _I wish I could just fall asleep! _This was the third night in a row that his sleep was disturbed by nightmares and the unfortunate result of a conscious that couldn't be turned off as effortlessly as a light. The vehicles on the road that passed their house didn't make it any easier to sleep with their loud roaring engines. He and his wife always regretted the decision to reside in a house right by the major roads. At first, they regretted it for the safety reasons but now they regretted it for the ample amount of noise. It hadn't been till the past month that both of them had begun to be troubled by it. The sound given off by the engines almost represented Mr. Cole's mind and reminded him of the chaos in their lives that had happened recently. He looked at Mrs. Cole who was sound asleep, and wished desperately to be sound asleep like his wife. He marveled at the fact that she would come home late and slip in to slumber. Five or so minutes went by and he still wasn't able to doze off in the fake world of sleeping that comforted him the most. It was then that he decided to get up out of bed to get a midnight snack. He pulled back the covers and sat quietly on the side of the bed for a couple of minutes, unable to instantly gather the strength to get up into a standing position. When he felt ready, his heavy feet touched the wooden floor and he hoisted himself up, pausing before moving again to be sure that he wasn't heard. He glanced to his side and saw his wife; silently he cursed his inability to sleep to himself. The last thing he wouldn't to do now was wake her up. Thankfully, to his relief, the floor didn't groan. He had no desire to awaken his wife and deal with her irritation.

Like his doctor, she had noticed a decline in the amount of sleep he had been gaining recently. To her, sleep was a way to escape the hardship they had been dealing with. In comparison to her husband, she had been getting more sleep lately than usual. It was mainly because once she hit the sack nothing could awake her, except for their obnoxious alarm clock that could have easily belonged to a boot camp at one point in time. Ever since the couple had been married he remembered her sleeping hard like a rock, the surrounding world unable to shake him. Now it seemed like the reverse with her loving sleep more than ever using it as an escape from the changes that had been occurring in their family and him avoiding sleep seeing as allowing the quiet to enter his weaker conscious and plant seeds of pain. The simplest shake shook him. It was like a constant earthquake was happening in his reality.

Like every other night in the past weeks, he looked at the room across the hall as he exited the master bedroom. It was a look of neither interest nor fright, but the look of a standard routine checkup that he had grown accustomed over so many years. The partially opened door made it easy to see the lonely spot of light coming from the room; Mr. Cole found this oddly comforting. The light never went off and when it did, it severely upset him. It shined so vibrantly in the darkness of the night, without it the hallway felt strange and weak to him just like his mind. Tonight it had attracted him more than usual and the room called out to him to cross its threshold. It had been a couple of days since he last made his presence in the room. During his therapy session last night, he realized that maybe, definitely, it was a mistake for him to believe he could successfully avoid reality. In his mind, he imagined all the light bulbs that had been wasted so far by keeping the vacant room illuminated. Each piece of the light bulb crushed and mixed in with soil at a dump, somewhere close by, just as everything else in this world that was decomposed by nature. The things that we buy, the things that we love, the things that we own all end up giving back to where it all came from. Things weather away as time goes on. There was no explanation for why the light was comforting; perhaps it was the reminiscence of what once was that gave the impression that things were better.

On the other hand, their other daughter, Angie, did not seem to recognize how it could be comforting at all. Like most people, to her it was just another dismal reminder of what happened the past several months. It was a process that was fighting against the healing process and spreading the seeds of pain. She was ready to start anew and have a fresh change of view. "A lot of people get impatient with the pace of change," it was a quote that the grief counselor once told her family.

Mr. Cole entered in to the room timidly. At first, he stood strong in the doorway just observing the room. He soon fell captive and weak to the room, like he was at the Holocaust museum when he was a kid realizing that all bad things were caused by factors that could have been easily changed. As he felt his knees buckle, he went to the queen-sized bed to sit on the edge.This museum was not of choice; however, it was his museum, his museum of moments frozen in time. It was almost two in the morning and all of a sudden he found himself making the bed with exact precision. He walked over to the closet that held the fresh sheets and pillow covers. It wasn't hard to find the set in the neatly organized closet. He spotted them right away and then proceeded to carry them back to the room and strip the bed of the old sheets. For a moment he paused and thought to himself that this was senseless. _This bed hasn't been used, not even touched in so long. It should not matter if it is made or not, it doesn't need to be anymore. _Yet he continued, and hoped that since it was two in the morning his family wouldn't wake up to see him. He took a mental note to not mention this to anyone, especially to his therapist on Monday. It was his secret; he couldn't bear to disappoint the therapist and even more his wife who was on the road to healing. Maybe even then Doctor Warren would finally just give up on him and release him. Doctor Warren had warned him that his wife was going on a different pace of healing than him, bluntly pointing out that it had caused a rift in their marriage recently that was too fragile to cause further damage to. His thoughts consumed his body and made him finish making the bed like he was the robot and his thoughts the human. He went on continuing to make the bed and pretty soon it was perfectly made. As he fluffed out the pillows and put the stuffed animals back on the bed in their order he heard someone come in to the room. The tears and pain that he had been collecting and locking up up since he had started making the bed found a way to escape from the lockbox buried in his heart.

Immediately he dropped to the ground, ashamed at this situation and wretched with sadness. No matter how hard he tried he couldn't put aside his feelings so easily like his wife, Julianne, and daughter, Aggie, had. More than anything, he really just wanted some pity even though deep down inside he felt like he deserved none. Society always makes guys look like the tough ones but who gave anyone the right to say that's really how they are. Everyone tends to expect men to follow that belief as well. It was something he had never really gotten the concept of when growing up. So like every other well-liked jock he always acted like nothing bothered him and lived life on the edge, until of course he was responsible for a whole family's welfare.

His wife and he had met during one of his many trips abroad to film various stunts for work. Crowds always came to watch the stunts if the filming happened to take place out in the open public area. The unacceptable weather conditions of that day prevented any stunts from working properly and had gotten him flustered. His mother always said a good coffee went far whenever he had walked past the coffee maker. He had never really believed her but that maybe it was time to finally test her phrase out for validity. So he went to a well-known bistro off a corner in Paris and ordered some Café crème. A young woman with brown hair who had witnessed the failure of the staunts happened to stop by the bistro as well. He remembered that day so well, the way she was so excited to run in to him and thought it was so cool how he did all those dangerous stunts without a care in the world. Nothing shook his fear. Her eyes bulged wide opened as he told her all the exciting things he had done so far in his career. The thing that he remembered most about that day was that fate somehow let him have coffee with a beautiful young woman that day in the most romantic place in the world with La Tour Eiffel lite up in the sky. Mr. Cole would never forget the moment that he set his blue handsome eyes on Aggie Martez. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Neither he nor she would ever imagine that day would be the starting point of their relationship. Often he felt the yawning for his stunt and exclusive time with Aggie in careless young romance again. Aggie and his relationship had been though a lot of turmoil the last month and nothing seemed as blissful as it was before. But, he still knew that he still had feelings and she still cared. It was the day of their wedding when they both promised each other commitment through rain and shine. They both just wanted to get through this together. However, at the moment they were just in a storm that was taking its time longer than usual and causing more havoc than usual. Life was a forecast full of them, but most people didn't have to handle this size of one.

His mind has gone astray and had forgotten that he was sitting on the ground. It was dead quiet as if he was being waiting on to say something.

Instead Aggie broke the silence, "Honey, Joe, I made some coffee and I know it's late but coffee has always helped you a little. Joe, honey, did you hear me?"

Joe didn't want coffee for once. It wouldn't help like it usually would. Most of all he didn't want to get up. He just wanted Aggie to come join him on the ground and comfort him like they had done for most of the past month. He just wanted to cry maybe, just once more.

"I'm guessing you don't want the coffee huh? Joe, you know this has been hard on all of us. Honey.. we are going to pull through this," Aggie reassured him in a soft tone.

Aggie got down on her knees and sat down along side him. She hugged him tightly for five minutes like he was a stuffed teddy bear that couldn't be squeezed too hard at all. Just when he had felt like all oxygen was gone, she leaned back with her left hand on his hand. Like patting a delicate baby, with her right hand she rubbed his back in a circular motion in the silence.

"I know," Joe quietly said. "I haven't been able to sleep. I wish I could sleep like you guys could. I miss her, Aggie. It's been a month and I feel like I'm never going to be able to ever get over our lost."

"It will be okay," comforted Aggie.

Joe put his head in the pillow that Aggie's hands created. She stroked his black silk hair as he lay across her. He began to sober until his sober broke into a hurricane of tears. His tears ran through the cracks of Aggie's hands, moistening them with water. It wasn't too soon later that she too cried along with her husband. They had been going through the dealing, they had done what their therapist had said but they needed to let their tears run loose, not alone but together. Aggie prayed to God during this time asking for little angels to come visit them. She had been praying a lot lately and going to church more than usual seeking help for both of them. Unlike those whose tragedy led them to hate god, she found that allowing herself to develop a connection with the man upstairs helped the question of why this happened to them ease.


End file.
